


a tiger is a tiger

by firstaudrina



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Series, references to Magnus/Camille
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:48:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24299869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: He found Dot in Catarina’s sitting room. She was wearing a man’s suit with her legs crossed at the ankles and a cigarette pinched between two fingers. Magnus liked her instantly.
Relationships: Magnus Bane/Dorothea "Dot" Rollins
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25
Collections: Shadowhunters Tarot Challenge





	a tiger is a tiger

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Shadowhunters Tarot Challenge, and also took some inspo from [this random tarot website](https://www.tarotcardmeanings.net/majorarcana/tarot-moon.htm).

The moon hung full and fat over the city. To Magnus it looked like a rounded fountain he had seen over a century ago, nestled in a nighttime garden and reflecting the torchlight across its circular surface like a plate. There had been a party, and they climbed into the fountain until their stockings were soaked; they’d spilled wine in the water and it looked like someone had been stabbed. Dizzy-drunk, he felt like he was looking up to look down, like he could climb backwards by stepping up into the sky, but he only managed to overbalance and trip off the curb.

“Hey now —” Laughing, Dot shot a hand out to grab him by the lapel of his jacket, though she wasn’t much steadier on her feet. “You want to be a warlock-shaped pancake under one of those damn cars?”

Dot hated cars. She’d hated them since the Model T. All that rattling, she said.

“I was just thinking about — god, do you ever think about how bright it is now?”

He used to think he’d go blind from gasoliers, and even those were a distant memory.

Dot laughed again. Her hair was ink-black and fashionably bobbed, her forehead bound in silver ribbon festooned with feathers. Her eyes were smudged with kohl and so were his, because they’d made themselves up to look the same. But she’d also painted her lips in a precise aubergine, her Cupid’s bow sharply defined against her powdered face. “So bright you still can’t see where you’re going. Come on — we’ll miss the show.”

Magnus stumbled in close and put his finger against her lips, thumb lightly tipping her chin up. Then he kissed her. She gasped into it, a quick little inhale against his mouth. She pushed him off. “You really are stuck in the past tonight.”

Her hand waved vaguely in the direction of her face and the lipstick was perfect again, as though his kiss had never left any impression at all. He could feel the waxy smear along his own mouth. He decided to leave it. He was drunk. “Only thinking how nice a kiss can be, my dear.”

He offered her his arm like a real gentleman. If he was sober, he would have been kinder, because their courting had come to an end fifty-odd years ago, when it became clear Magnus was not in love with her, even though he wished he was. It would be very lovely to be in love with her; she was a lovely girl.

Dot smiled. She held no torch. “Nice,” she said, “isn’t the word I’d use.”

Seventy years before, Magnus had been temporarily installed in the spare room at Catarina’s, having been left by Camille not so long ago with his heart in shards like a vase tumbled off the sideboard. He spent most nights picking at the pieces and trying to glue them back together, lumpy rivulets between the reformed porcelain. There was always fun to be had. Magnus knew the right bars, the secret passwords; he’d stop by for a drink and put up cloaking spells and wards to keep the officers away, then dance until dawn with all manner of partners.

He liked to have fun. He swore he did. Camille may have thought otherwise, but Camille was on another continent, probably bathing in champagne and plucking pearls from the teeth of a thousand suitors —

He found Dot in Catarina’s sitting room, which was the only place he _hadn’t_ looked for someone to pass the night with. She was wearing a man’s suit with her legs crossed at the ankles and a cigarette pinched between two fingers. Magnus liked her instantly.

Dorothea was young for a warlock, and therefore exhausting to most of them. She had only stopped aging a couple of centuries before. She still had living descendants, and her childhood was not yet ashes in her mouth. Catarina said, “I’m almost afraid to introduce you to one another,” but she had anyway, and Magnus kissed Dot’s knuckles with a smile.

“You look like you know the best places to go for a good time,” he said.

Dot told him, “My apartment’s a good start,” which made him laugh more honestly than he had since the days before Camille smiled at him with a mouth full of razors.

Twenty years after that. 

Dot chided him for it, but Magnus had always favored mortal lovers; if he was in a callous mood, he might joke that it certainly decreased the number of awkward run-ins he was likely to have. He put no limitations on his immortality and indulged near every whim, shared his bed with anyone he felt like sharing it with, but he couldn’t help wondering if a part of him liked a finite end — sorrowful and sweet, no one’s fault but time.

He was wondering when he would end things with Dot.

It seemed selfish to call it quits when nothing was wrong. Magnus and Dot were alike enough that they could both dance the night away when they were bored, drink wine from the neck of the bottle, charm anyone with a turn around the dancefloor. They could induce the same long-suffering sigh from Catarina, and they were the only two people living who could drink Ragnor under the table. When Magnus turned to her for a kiss, Dot always leaned into it without hesitation. She was a friend first and no loss as a lover, and that was what Magnus had always wanted, except when he sat with her during quiet mornings, he thought, _what else_.

It was a very cruel thought.

He met her at the corner under a streetlamp, dinner awaiting them somewhere ineffably glamorous. The lights were electric now, and Magnus loved electricity because it was like magic, but the mundanes had made it themselves. Dot was lit up, a picture in a blue gown with a cinched waist and bustle, her hat perched neatly atop her gathered hair. A diamond pin he’d given her glinted from her neckline. If she was a mundane woman and Magnus her mortal paramour, he might have given her a ring and a child and all those other things people did to mark time, and to forget time. To perpetuate themselves over eons. But Magnus and Dorothea would perpetuate all on their own. Other things had to make the time worth having.

When he broke with her, he cried, but she didn’t. “Don’t give me your guilt,” she said. “I didn’t ask for it.”

Magnus didn’t see her for many years, but then there she was in a spangled gown at a speakeasy with a cigarette in one hand and a highball in the other. “Do you remember,” he said, “when I might have gasped at the sight of your ankles? Fainted at the mere hint of knee?”

“I like to live in the now,” Dot teased. He wondered if she was like he was on the inside, all held together with glimmers of gold and grit. You couldn’t tell from looking at her either way. “The past doesn’t suit me.”


End file.
